Elton Spitzer, 84, Who Helped Turn WLIR Into a Radio Destination, Dies

In 1982, Elton Spitzer, a former food stand operator who happened to like music, was running WLIR, a small rock ’n’ roll radio station on the outskirts of New York City that was struggling to carve out space for itself in a major market crowded with more powerful competitors. So he decided to take a risk.

At a time when punk was evanescing into the so-called new wave and bands like the Pretenders and Talking Heads were propelling a new rock aesthetic, Mr. Spitzer and his program director, Denis McNamara, committed the station’s music menu to emergent sounds. At the same time, they unfastened the typical restraints on commercial radio disc jockeys, giving them unusual freedom and allowing a frenetic subversiveness to take hold.

The result was a phenomenon, as WLIR, broadcasting at a mere 3,000 watts from a studio in Hempstead on Long Island (its tower was in Garden City) with the slogan “Dare to be different,” made 92.7 FM a destination on the radio dial — especially for a youthful, high-energy, music-savvy audience that hungered for a change from the album-oriented pop that blared repetitiously from the region’s other larger progressive rock stations.

There were few other places for radio listeners to hear American bands like the Replacements and the B-52s (the station also claimed it was the first to play Madonna), or imports including Tears for Fears, U2, the Smiths and Duran Duran.

Mr. Spitzer, who died in Baltimore on April 17, at the age of 84, lost the station in 1987 when the Federal Communications Commission awarded the license to the frequency to another operator, but not before WLIR had documented an evolving rock scene, introduced its listeners to music and musicians that most Americans hadn’t heard before and earned a hallowed place in the annals of rock radio.

(Another station, WPIX-FM in New York, had tried a similar approach a little earlier, but without much success.)

Mr. Spitzer’s son, Shane, said his father, who had family in the Baltimore area, died from complications of Parkinson’s disease in an assisted-living home. He had previously lived in Brooklyn.

The station did not reach far beyond its Long Island environs — into Queens, a little bit of southern Connecticut, maybe northern New Jersey if you twiddled the dial — but like the earliest incarnation of MTV, which made its debut in 1981, it had the effect of propelling new music into wider circulation.

Mr. Spitzer, an experienced salesman, peddled the station’s airtime to sponsors by emphasizing the concentrated ardor of the audience; at the same time, the station made the most of its locale, engaging in mutual promotions with local dance clubs, arranging free concerts and broadcasting them and featuring a regular “Screamer of the Week” contest, in which listeners would call in and vote for their favorite new song.

D.J.s sometimes injected sound clips from movies or cartoons as commentary, snarky or otherwise, on the music scene and current events. To keep ahead of the musical trends in England, the station had an arrangement with a London record store to ship over a box of new records each week.

“We’d meet the plane at J.F.K. every Thursday,” Larry Dunn, a D.J. known as Larry the Duck who was also the station’s music director, said in an interview. “I’d go through it, and we’d add new music for the week.”

Mr. McNamara gave Mr. Spitzer credit for a unique outlook among station operators.

“Elton totally gave me creative freedom,” he said last week. “He wanted to make the station more cosmopolitan and wanted it event-oriented. Because of music we played, we had a tremendously loyal audience, and he was very proud that we made a big noise in the biggest media market in the world.”

Elton Leopold Spitzer was born in Brooklyn on Feb. 25, 1932, to Harold Spitzer and the former Gertrude Schwartz. He graduated from Lincoln High School and served in the Army in Japan during the Korean War. For a time he ran food stands in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

He sold airtime for radio stations in Chicago and New York, and around 1973 he bought a minority interest in WLIR, a station founded in 1959 that through the 1960s had played a mix of Broadway show tunes and classical music.

The station shifted to a progressive rock format in 1970 and by late in the decade had already begun to feature punk and new wave bands — Blondie, Devo, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts — among conventional playlist entries such as Bruce Springsteen, the Grateful Dead and a local boy made good, Billy Joel.

In 1976, the station lost its bid to have its license renewed by the F.C.C., at least in part because of past violations by John Rieger, Mr. Spitzer’s partner. Mr. Rieger appealed the ruling and eventually worked out a deal in which he would end his appeal and the F.C.C. would give a temporary license to Mr. Spitzer.

For the next several years, as other interested parties filed applications for the license, Mr. Spitzer kept extending his temporary one. But in 1987, after five raucous years, a new licensee, Jared Communications, assumed control of the 92.7 frequency, though Mr. Spitzer maintained ownership of the call letters and the slogan “Dare to be different.” He made several attempts to recreate the magic of the WLIR of the early ’80s elsewhere, but never succeeded.

(The station went off the air in 2004, but a website, WLIR.FM, keeps its memory alive, streaming music that Mr. Spitzer’s station had played.)

Mr. Spitzer married Rinette Plourde, known as Renée, in 1963. She died in 2007. In addition to his son, he is survived by a brother, Stanley; a stepdaughter, Beverly Marchica; two step-grandchildren; and five step-great-grandchildren.

One of WLIR’s more obsessive fans during its 1980s heyday was Ellen Goldfarb, now a filmmaker whose documentary about the station, “Dare to Be Different,” featuring interviews with musicians like Fred Schneider of the B-52s and Dave Wakeling of the English Beat, is in postproduction. In a teaser for the film, the renegade nature of the place is evident.

“When Reagan got re-elected,” the former D.J. Ben Manilla recalls, “I played the Ramones’ ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’ 15 times in a row.”

Correction:

An obituary on Monday about Elton Spitzer, who for many years ran the Long Island radio station WLIR, misspelled the surname of his stepdaughter, who survives him. She is Beverly Marchica, not Machica.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D7 of the New York edition with the headline: Elton Spitzer, 84, Who Helped Turn WLIR Into a Radio Destination, Dies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe